Farmpunk Retro

A while ago, I was doing a fair amount of reading on the global food system. I read Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, a rather remarkable case-study on plant biology, ecology, marketing, big business, and shock doctrine politics, with significant implications for global food security. I read Raj Patel's Stuffed and Starved and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which present excellent critiques of the economic and cultural drawbacks, respectively, of the modern global food system. (I wrote a long essay summarizing some of the central points of those books, but I recommend putting those on your reading list, too.) In response to my apparent interest in the topic, my parents pointed out that my great-grandfather, David Greenberg, had co-authored a book on the subject: So You're Going to Buy a Farm.

Reading that article about farmpunk brought me back to that last book. What struck me most about the book was the cultural difference in attitudes towards farming. The book was strikingly like tech entrepreneurship self-help books of the 90s. Farming is a great job, filled with boundless opportunity. Those with a strong back and a steady head can work hard and reap the rewards, all while enjoying great side-benefits. Farmers work outside, often in beautiful scenery. The work is hard, but you become strong, and you produce a high-quality, tangible product that benefits society. Farmers utilize the latest science. If you're clever, you can sometimes buy a great (but mismanaged or underutilized) property for a song, turn it around in a few years, and sell it for a substantial sum when you're ready for a change of jobs or ready to retire.

The modern American (first-world in general?) attitude towards farming is much less positive. Farming is dirty, boring, smelly, not technologically innovative, not financially lucrative. This isn't apropos of nothing: The economic factors of the modern global food system make all of those more-or-less true. Consolidation of food processors has pushed margins so thin that farmers have to maximize yield just to get by (and subsidies tend to ensure a lock-in at the "just barely making a living" point). Have a bad year and farmers have to take out loans to pay for seeds, which has them locked in further. Buy genetically-modified seeds for increased (but infertile) yield, and you're locked into paying for that, too, even if it turns out to be a bad idea in the long run. The only advantage of this "yield at all costs" approach is that the petroleum-intensive technologies minimize the number of days you work (but the work is boring and no guarantee your time off will be any more exciting).

I suspect this is a vicious cycle. The bad image of farming keeps innovators out, and the economic conditions that make modern farming so unpleasant are sustained.

I think that part of the promise of urban farming methods is cultural. If we want food security in the medium term, we need current engineers, innovators, entrepreneurs, makers, scientists to become interested in food production. A lot of those people flock to the city: That's where the excitement is, great institutions of learning, like-minded people, business opportunities. Those innovators who start off interested in farming might head to rural areas, but those are too few.

The good news is that we'll also need urban farming to solve the logistical / distribution / energy problems of getting food to people in the city, so it's two birds with one stone.

I'll conclude this with some further book recommendations, my next selections to read on this topic: Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal by Joel Salatin (who has to be at the top of my list of "names to pay attention to" in food security, I'd also suggest his You Can Farm for more serious aspiring farmers/-punks) and Feeding People Is Easy by Colin Tudge (a great choice for those worried about seemingly-insurmountable problems at the intersection of food security and sustainability).